Vermilion Cliffs Ventures Fund II has closed at $25 million, giving Ashley Smith fresh capital to back technical founders building in AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools from her base in New York. Smith founded the firm in 2023 after a career in marketing at companies including Twilio, Facebook, GitHub, and GitLab. She runs it as a solo general partner, a structure that remains uncommon in venture capital and rarer still for women. The raise took roughly four months, with much of the capital coming from existing investors who backed her debut fund. Vermilion Cliffs Ventures Fund II: The Mechanics…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
The ZML inference server LLMD has arrived as a free product, promising to run open-source large language models at full speed across a sprawling range of chips: Nvidia, AMD, Google’s TPU, Apple Metal, and Intel Arc. The Paris-based startup, founded by Steeve Morin and endorsed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, is aiming squarely at one of enterprise AI’s most persistent frustrations: the software lock-in that forces companies to build for one chip vendor and stay there. What the ZML Inference Server Actually Does Inference, the process of handling live prompts once a model is trained, has quietly overtaken training…
Startup Battlefield Australia applications will close on 20 July after TechCrunch granted one final extension, citing overwhelming interest from founders across the region. There will be no further reprieve. Eight startups will take the stage on 19 August 2026 at Stripe Tour Sydney. The top three finishers receive up to $15,000 in Stripe fee credits. The grand prize carries something harder to put a number on: automatic entry into Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, which runs at San Francisco’s Moscone West on October 13 to 15, with the Startup Battlefield 200 winner taking home a $100,000 equity-free prize.…
The Netflix publisher video deals launching on 3 August will place short-form content from BuzzFeed Studios, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, People, Tastemade, and a cluster of Penske Media PMX brands directly on the platform’s homepage, giving YouTube-style formats a foothold inside the world’s largest subscription streamer. The rollout covers subscribers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Videos will range from two to three minutes for the briefest clips to well past 20 minutes for longer-form series, according to the publisher partners. For Netflix, the logic is straightforward. Its existing ‘Clips’ feature was designed…
X’s new video editor features are the platform’s latest attempt to persuade creators to post original work rather than recycle content that has already gone viral elsewhere. The social network announced the in-app tools this week, framing them as part of a broader push to rebuild a credible creator ecosystem, though the obstacles in the way are considerably larger than any single product update. What the X Video Editor Features Include The editor arrives with a practical toolkit. The Verge reports that it includes trimming tools, automatic caption generation, multilingual caption overlays with customisable styles, and green-screen functionality that draws…
More than 100 Forterra autonomous vehicles in Ukraine have completed over 1,100 missions across nine months of live combat operations, the company disclosed this week, marking what it describes as the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in conflict by any US defence-technology firm. The numbers are specific enough to make the point. Forterra’s gas-powered Lancer ATVs, built on a Polaris platform and fitted with a custom sensor and compute stack, have driven more than 2,500 miles, moved 777,440 pounds of cargo, and completed 52 casualty evacuations since arriving in Ukraine last October. What Forterra’s Lancer Vehicles Are Actually Doing…
The Netflix binge model, built to defeat linear television, is increasingly running up against a different kind of competitor, and the numbers are starting to show it. A Bloomberg report citing internal Netflix data found that viewers are abandoning popular shows before the second season arrives, pointing to a structural problem that runs deeper than any single cancellation or scheduling delay. Streaming Has Already Won the Old War When Netflix dropped the first season of House of Cards in February 2013, it did something genuinely new. It handed viewers an entire season at once, untethered from broadcast schedules and advertising…
The Xbox restructuring layoffs announced on 7 July 2026 are the most visible sign yet that Microsoft’s gaming division has arrived at a genuine inflection point, not merely another round of belt-tightening. Of the 4,800 roles cut across Microsoft that day, representing roughly 2.1% of its global workforce, 1,600 belonged to Xbox. A Business Sharma Called ‘Not Healthy’ Asha Sharma, chief executive of Xbox, called the move ‘the most significant restructure in Xbox history’ in an email to staff. Her diagnosis was blunt: ‘Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable…
The Even Realities funding round that closed this month places the three-year-old Shenzhen startup firmly in unicorn territory: $150 million raised in a pre-Series B, led by Meituan and existing backer Tencent, at a $1 billion valuation. The bet at the centre of it is a deliberate step away from the camera-first direction that Meta and Snap are sprinting toward. Even Realities was founded in 2023 by ex-Apple engineers. CEO Will Wang, who spent two years at Apple before leaving in 2018 contributing to both the Apple Watch and iPhone, co-founded the company alongside Dan Hu and Li Wang. Two…
The Agility Robotics SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI will, if it clears shareholder approval and SEC review, make the Salem, Oregon-based company the first pure-play humanoid robotics business to trade on a major North American exchange, under the ticker AGLT. The deal values Agility at around $2.5 billion and is expected to raise more than $620 million in gross proceeds. The capital structure has two components. Churchill XI’s trust account holds approximately $420 million, assuming no redemptions. A separate PIPE of approximately $200 million in domesticated SPAC common stock, priced at $10.00 per share and led by Foxconn,…
